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What’s the best way to improve retention?

Boris Wertz (Founder of version one ventures) Customer success is important, but sometimes it’s just too late – Version OneThe big question for you is how can you hook a customer in the first 10 minutes? If you want to increase goal completion, customer success emails and sales outreach might be too late and reactive. One of my portfolio companies recently discovered through a variety of a/b tests that user engagement within the first 10 minutes is crucial for their product, as there’s an exponential drop-off in engagement after that time. Another take-away from tho… (read more)

Ryan Battles (Co-founder of HarpoonApp) Turning your Customers into Fans | by @ryanbattlesOur co-founder was always striving to inject “MEMs” into our product, that is, “Memorable Engaging Moments. ” Essentially, we were trying to create situations where a customer does X, expects Y, but receives Y, Z, and a few other extras. People are getting used to transactional emails, “thanking you” for your purchase. What if you actually sent them a short video clip of someone on your customer success team thanking them by name, and giving them… (read more)

Sangeet Paul Choudary (Founder at Platform Thinking) Marketplace 2.0 : How To Engage And Keep UsersThese are the key mechanisms by which [products] can move to an engaged and ‘sticky’ experience: Reputation Systems, Collections, Personalized Feed, Influence, Workflow management, Substituting transactions with subscriptions

Andrew Chen (Growth at Uber) Why consumer product metrics are all terrible at andrewchenOverall you lose a ton of active users, a result of (i) how many users sign up and actually try out your product (onboarding), (ii) how many days they are active within a month (frequency), and (iii) how useful your product is over time (long term retention).

Jason Lemkin (Managing Director at Storm Ventures, SaaStr.com) How to think about churn | A Founder’s NotebookYou’re going to end up with an organic churn rate that is inherent to your product. The most important thing is measure it and then drive it down. That’s what I did. We set a goal at Echosign to decrease churn 20% year over year. You need to measure it and force the team to own a metric.

Andrew Tate (Writer, former Nueroscientist) How to reduce Churn by building a bulletproof retention process1. Define your goals. Your overall goal is to reduce churn, but to make this actionable you need to both quantify this goal and break it down further into smaller goals. 2. Ask the right questions. Drill down to specifics as much as possible. 3. Develop your hypothesis. Developing a hypothesis forces you to think about your questions in more detail and the impact of experiments on churn. 4. Test and analyze your ideas. Get the minimum viable test… (read more)

Ben Yoskovitz (VP Product at VarageSale, VP Product at GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce), Author of Lean Analytics) Engagement is a Long-Term ProcessProvide opportunities for early users to engage in common ways, so there’s no learning curve and they get an immediate reward. Look at all the “features” on your site or in your product and figure out how one leads to the next. Each step along the way has to create value for you and for the user.

Ben Yoskovitz (VP Product at VarageSale, VP Product at GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce), Author of Lean Analytics) Grabbing Attention and Holding Onto ItIf you’re building a product that doesn’t have a daily or weekly use case be very, very afraid. Certainly there are products that don’t get used a lot and are very successful (tax software anyone?) but it’s not a direction I’d recommend.